The Burial of Follicles

Where we bury our dead has always been a semiotic game.
–Jon Kyst

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My Danish Language and Culture class gathered around me.  The visage of Mette, our professor, cracked into a proud smile as she awaited my speech.  Only now did I consider her rigidly horizontal bangs oppressive.  I remember the self-satisfaction oozing from her as she had doled out speaking assignments for our field study—my last—one week earlier.

“And Tom will be presenting on…Søren Kierkegaard!”  Certainly this had been planned; she could intuit the obsession, if not the deepening void, that lay inside me regarding that man.  So there we were, in Assistens Kirkegård, standing before his grave.  I had tried to locate Regine Olsen before our scheduled meeting, but she was hidden from me.

“Before he wrote his most famous works, Kierkegaard was engaged to Olsen.  But immediately after proposing to her, he realized it was a mistake.  We don’t know the exact reason he felt this way—possibly he thought he was ‘already married to God,’ or didn’t want married life to interfere with his writing.  But at any rate, he abandoned her.  He became world famous, but his love for her never died.”

The rest moved on to Niels Bohr.  I lagged behind, once again finding it hard to leave his grave, just as it was that first time on Groundhog Day, when I had barely finished my second week in Copenhagen.  The flowers were blooming and the leaves spreading around the marble slabs now, on the fifth of May.  But I was determined to leave yet another marker on the tomb.

I withdrew from my left coat pocket the small cardboard box that had once, months ago, contained the gift certificate I had won from that Arrival Week Scavenger Hunt around the city.  I opened it gingerly.  There he was, his body now wan from death but still retaining its distinctive half black/half gray division.  From my right pocket I took a small garden spade–stolen from my host family—that would serve but one purpose.

“Oh Follicles, I knew this day would come.  You knew, even in that moment of passion, that I hated myself for the act, however much I concealed myself behind calculated gestures.  I tried to terminate our connection…I hoped that would make it easier.  But now I see that is not possible.  Will not some part of me be buried with you?  Merciful God!”

My fist clenched around the spade.  Closing the iron gate behind me, I knelt for a third time before the one man whose life thread was most similar to my own. With clinical precision I sliced the earth; I wanted only a shallow wound, afraid I would pierce the coffin beneath (on a related note, it is astonishing how poor the security at Assistens Kirkegård has become).  Gently I lowered the box into my makeshift burial chamber, delaying the closing of the casket until the last possible moment.  I finished: “There is no way I can recoup the harm done to you, to our relationship.  But I will ensure you are not alone.  And there is only one other worthy of sharing your tomb.  Now rest with him—find the peace that neither you, nor he, could find in life.”

I crossed myself and closed the cardboard casket.  My hands smothered it with the tilled earth, leaving a brown bump beneath the psalm inscribed on Søren’s slab.  I put the spade back in my right pocket, and to support myself I thoughtlessly dug my fingers down over the new grave.

And instantly I knew something was very wrong.  It was a terrible, cosmically terrible mistake I had made.  I had forgotten what a ley line Follicles had shown himself to be; I had forgotten the magical conflations possible on anniversaries, when we so often visit the graves of loved ones—and it was the one hundred and ninety-seventh anniversary of that man’s birth that very day.  These forces together allowed my now-dead creation to form a micron-bridge to the exact sphere of being that most frightened and hypnotized me.  The recursive grave I had callously created—this game I was playing, along with all the games you have been reading about these past four months—was something much more sinister than anything I could have intended.  There was no way out, I knew, even as I saw Mette’s face disappear behind a distant tombstone.  With fascinated horror, I felt him flow from the deep earth into Follicles’ ventricles—if hairs can be said to contain ventricles—and from there through my fingertips to my innermost marrow, shooting straight to the spine and going up, up, up to the medulla.  And everything flared white before the sun was shut off…I fell, and darkness descended.

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